Word: varadero
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...pretty, poor fishing town of palm trees and empty streets--few people can afford a car--and Juan Miguel lives, by relative standards, the good life. He is among the lucky elite who are paid in dollars, in his job as a guard and cashier at the Varadero tourist resort, Cuba's version of Cancun. Altogether, in wages, tips and bonuses, he earns more than 10 times Cuba's $15 average monthly salary--enough to afford to buy Elian imported Power Ranger toys and birthday pinatas fat with Italian hard candy and German chocolates...
...Varadero, there is money. Resorts and busloads of European tourists waiting impatiently in lobbies for their bags to be ported to their private beachside cabanas. There are buffets and games of water polo organized in the main pool--a ridiculous sort of comfort level for about $100 a night. (Best yet, the help is obsequious and a 50[cent] tip would do just fine!) After being turned away at the daunting gates of the massive Club Med, we drop our luggage next door and set out to the area's most fiery hot spot, the Cafe Havana, a huge disco/Hard...
...next day we're off, Varadero to Cienfuegos. First passengers, from a roadside crowd of 15 or 20: a mother-and-child duo, the mother skinny and snaggle-toothed, the baby perfect and in pink, 11 months old, little black shoes, shiny; they're headed home. We roll with them past horse-drawn wagons and slow, lanky cows. Egrets skim over the road, perpendicular. Air warm, sky overcast. The car screams...
...sale at the farmer markets. The Youth Labor Army, a paramilitary force of conscripts, devotes most of its time to farming. Since civilians were pilfering up to 75% of food shipments, soldiers now guard deliveries. The army's construction company, Union de Empresas Constructoras, is building tourist facilities in Varadero and Havana...
...abandoned in an effort to survive without Soviet assistance. The Cuban tourism industry, for instance, one of the few bright spots in the island's economic fiasco, is closed off to Cuban citizens. Cubans cannot visit the Tropicana, eat at a restaurant, or go to the nicest strips of Varadero beach, which today is used instead by Spanish, Canadian and German tourists...